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A descriptive analysis of Islamic State curriculum narrative and educational intentions implemented in northern Iraq between 2014 and 2017.

Tue, April 16, 10:00 to 11:30am, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Bay (Level 1), Golden Gate

Proposal

This research was prompted by the major change in the situation in northern Iraq, specifically when the Iraqi government announced in December 2017 the end of the battle to regain control of areas held by the Islamic State (ISIS). The main goal of this research project is to produce knowledge that can be used to develop informal education initiatives to facilitate students’ return in the official Iraqi school system. Iraq’s humanitarian crisis recently entered a new phase as people forced to flee slowly make their way back home. In addition to the 3.4 million internally displaced persons across Iraq, 8.7 million people need humanitarian assistance (IOM, 2018). Over 4 million of those displaced people are concentrated in the Ninewa, Kirkuk and Anbar governorates. In Kirkuk alone, 1.6 million civilians require assistance (UNHCR, 2018). Of this number, about 800,000 children and youth have suffered the consequences of the war. Furthermore, most of them spent about three years in the educational system implemented by ISIS. Until now, little information is available about the educational experience of these children. Therefore, this research thus aims to analyze the school material produced by ISIS and the curriculum implemented in northern Iraq between 2014 and 2017. In a methodological perspective, since there is practically no literature on this topic and as well as education under any authoritarian proto-state, the project is based in grounded theory. The grounded theory methodology is widely used in social sciences, and especially in humanitarian studies (Almonte, 2009; Klumpp et al., 2015; Koddenbrock, 2015). The generation of an autonomic theory increases the potential for reusing the knowledge produced by the research by humanitarian workers (Nilsson et al., 2011). This is an important consideration for this project. The printed school material analyzed in the project was recovered near Hawija and Anbar West (Kirkuk Governorate, Iraq) just after the resumption of these areas by the Iraqi army and militias, where physical copies have been systematically found in schools. Indeed, some schools still have a certain amount of material coming from the period of their operation under the caliphate. The corpus was compiled using both field and online data. All these documents make up a didactic set and can be divided into three categories. First, we have collected 37 physical documents (manuals, notebooks, guides, tutorials, pamphlets, posters and exams). The second category is made of 16 scanned books recovered in the field but whose physical copies could not be routed to the research team. Finally, the third part of the corpus consists of 53 PDF documents, including primary and elementary textbooks and administrative documents, which were retrieved online. As a preliminary phase of the research project, a descriptive study of this corpus was carried out in order to sketch a first overview of ISIS curriculum. A content analysis method was favored in order to identify the most relevant units of meaning (Gauthier and Bourgeois 2016). Thus, the produced synthesis aims to achieve the following specific objectives: (1) Put together ISIS’s curriculum; (2) Compare some components of the ISIS’s curriculum with the official Iraqi curriculum; (3) describe the educational intentions and objectives of this curriculum. At this stage of the data analysis, results show (1) significative differences in schooling by comparison to the formal Iraqi education system; (2) violent content-matter contextualization in several disciplines such as mathematics or computer programming; (3) complex ideological narratives in social studies and literacy deconstructing concepts such as nationalism or citizenship; (4) contextualization using surahs in science education.

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